Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced Amazon FinSpace, a purpose-built analytics service that reduces the time it takes FSI organizations to find, prepare, and analyze financial data from months to minutes. Amazon FinSpace aggregates, catalogs, and tags data across an organization’s data silos, making the data easily searchable by the entire organization. The service includes a purpose-built managed Apache Spark analytics engine that contains over 100 data transformations commonly used in the capital markets industry to prepare data for analytics at petabyte scale. To make it easier for FSI organizations to meet their compliance requirements, Amazon FinSpace ensures that data access controls are enforced and usage is tracked at all times. Amazon FinSpace provides an easy-to-use web application that gives analysts at hedge funds, asset management firms, insurance companies, investment banks, and other FSI organizations access to the information they need and the ability to run powerful analytics on demand across all of their data. There are no upfront costs or commitments to use Amazon FinSpace, and customers only pay for the data stored, the users enabled, and the compute used to prepare and analyze data. To learn more about Amazon FinSpace, go to https://aws.amazon.com/finspace.

Today’s FSI organizations are generating and collecting hundreds of petabytes of data every day from internal data sources like portfolio management systems, order management systems, and execution management systems—as well as third-party data feeds like high-volume historical equities pricing data, employment figures, and earnings reports. These organizations want to use the petabytes of data they possess to gain insights that help identify new sources of revenue, attract and retain customers, and reduce cost or risk. However, before data can be analyzed, FSI companies typically spend months finding the right data and getting it prepared for analysis. Discovering and preparing data is time-consuming because FSI organizations have data in silos distributed across departments that specialize in particular assets or geographies and generate specialized data (e.g. equities, options, bonds, European mutual funds, Asian currencies, etc.). Furthermore, data access is tightly controlled by regulation and policy, meaning analysts must justify to compliance officers how their access will conform to data use policies before they can access the data. Once they are granted access to the data, analysts must prepare it for analysis by iteratively performing data transformations to discover new insights within the data. For example, capital markets traders often use technical indicators like Bollinger Bands, Exponential Moving Averages, and Average True Range to identify undiscovered trends and patterns. Many of the data analytics tools available to analysts today were built to run on a single computer and were not designed to take advantage of the cloud’s scale and the ability to compute heavy analysis on-demand. As a result, analysts either have to use small representative datasets that limit predictive ability, or the data has to be manually broken up into many subsets, transformed piecemeal, and manually recombined. Neither approach is ideal or effective.

Amazon FinSpace solves the challenges FSI organizations face by vastly simplifying the steps needed to find, prepare, and analyze data, reducing the time involved from months to minutes. Customers begin by ingesting data into Amazon FinSpace from internal data silos or third-party data feeds via the service’s Application Programming Interface (API) or a drag-and-drop interface in the web application. To find data, customers simply browse a visual catalog and search for familiar business terms like options trades for the last three years or U.S. automotive bonds from within the web application. Amazon FinSpace includes built-in classification schemas for common FSI data sources (e.g. trades, corporate actions, and economic data) that customers can customize to their needs, so the data can be organized in a way that is easy to find and share. Amazon FinSpace records the daily updates and corrections received for datasets and processes them to create point-in-time views to validate modeling assumptions and to show what data was used to inform past decisions for historical analysis. Customers can use built-in Jupyter Notebooks to access data stored in Amazon FinSpace and can then choose from over 100 built-in functions to prepare their data for analysis (e.g. Bollinger Bands, Exponential Moving Averages, and Average True Range)—or they can build and use their own functions to prepare data for analysis. Amazon FinSpace provides managed Spark clusters that can be scaled up or down on demand so organizations can benefit from the elasticity, scale, and cost savings provided by cloud computing. Customers define their data access policies within Amazon FinSpace, and the policies are automatically enforced across data search, visualization, and analysis. Amazon FinSpace records data access, tracks data usage, and generates compliance and activity reports indicating who accessed data at what point in time.

“FSI organizations generate and purchase massive amounts of data, but using this data is very difficult because of the time and effort it takes to collect and prepare data for analysis,” said Saman Michael Far, VP of Financial Services Technology, AWS. “Amazon FinSpace is a game changer for FSI organizations. Amazon FinSpace radically reduces the time it takes for FSI customers to do analytics across petabytes of data, making it significantly easier for them to identify new sources of revenue, attract customers, and reduce cost and risk.”

Amazon FinSpace is generally available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), and Europe (Ireland), with availability in additional regions coming soon.

Legal & General Reinsurance (L&G Re) is the global reinsurance hub of the Legal & General Group with a specialty in the reinsurance of annuities, particularly pension risk transfer business. “At Legal & General, our mission is to guarantee the long-term financial security of our clients’ customers around the world,” said Thomas Olunloyo, CEO of L&G Re. “Our reinsurance specialists work with a broad range of data to measure asset performance, mortality, and longevity risk. Today, this data is distributed and stored across many teams, systems, and structures. We are excited about the release of Amazon FinSpace and its ability to help us unlock the full power of our data to enable our team and efficiently give new insights to our clients. Amazon FinSpace will transform how we use data by giving our analysts the ability to instantly and easily access all the company’s data to carry out analysis faster and immediately share the results across the business, while ensuring our data governance and access control policies are met in full.”

Deloitte is helping transform organizations around the globe. The organization continuously evolves how it works and how it looks at marketplace challenges so it can continue to deliver measurable, sustainable results for its clients and communities. “In working with financial services industry clients, we have found that cloud-based analytics and AI/ML allow us to answer questions that we couldn’t answer several years ago and drive value in new ways. Data, analytics, and AI/ML will continue to be key and become even more important to financial institutions’ decision making and business outcomes over the next decade,” said Jojy Mathew, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Deloitte’s Financial Services Data and Analytics Leader globally. “When companies are building algorithmic, stochastic and predictive models, large data sets are key. Amazon FinSpace will allow users to process petabytes of data at the scale demanded. In addition, FinSpace enables ‘analytics sandboxes’ to be created quickly and brings advanced analytics capabilities to citizen data scientists.”

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Procensus, the opinion sharing community for institutional investors, today launched a premium service which extends access to the platform’s benchmarking data to corporates, capital markets bankers, alternative asset managers and regulatory authorities, providing them with enhanced market intelligence.

Procensus provides access to the highest quantity and quality of buy-side opinion data in the market, and the first-of-its-kind platform leverages advanced technology to capture a measurable score of investor sentiment against stocks, transactions (IPOs and M&A) plus ESG metrics with a proven track record for enhancing investment returns.

“We are delighted to extend access to the Procensus platform beyond institutional investors to a wider universe of market participants who will benefit from our unique source of transparent, unconflicted and unbiased market intelligence while protecting the anonymity of its members,” said Ed Allchin, Founder of Procensus and Autonomous Research.  “Procensus is a transformational data-driven platform generating insight into market sentiment – we expect it to become a de facto industry utility for centralising investor opinion, particularly around IPOs where we currently have a leadership position.”

“Procensus leverages a polling capability, data engine and rating system to capture and benchmark buy-side consensus, and to generate alpha, in a significantly more efficient way than the current human interface that is prevalent in the capital markets,” said Alastair Walmsley, CEO of Procensus.  “With a fast-growing community of more than 5,500 members from almost 1,500 institutions and with most of the world’s largest asset managers already active on the platform, we believe this innovative tool will become a critical component in the way information is shared across capital markets.”

Members of the Procensus community submit their views to the platform anonymously – offering a secure way of benchmarking opinions and framing consensus.  Pro-Ratings are generated from this opinion data to provide an aggregated, live gauge of stock sentiment.  In turn these are scored and ranked against peers.  Where opinions are adequately liquid and extreme these are synthesised into Pro-Signals or actionable recommendations (Buy, Hold, Sell). Using these Pro-Signals, the Procensus Market Neutral Pro-Folio returned +10.1% absolute return in 2020.

Procensus is now available to corporates, capital markets advisory teams, private equity and venture capital investors, and regulators, as well as institutional investors.

Featurespace, the leading provider of Enterprise Crime Prevention software, has received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade.  

This is the second time the company has received a Queen's Award, the first being in 2018 in the Innovation category for its pioneering work in fraud prevention technology.   

One of 205 organisations to be honoured, Featurespace secured the Queen's Award for Enterprise - now in its 55th year - for its outstanding commitment to protecting organisations around the globe from financial crime with its award-winning fraud prevention and anti-money laundering software. 

“Having studied and founded a company out of Cambridge, as well as witnessing our expansion to the Americas and Asia-Pacific, this is a tremendous honour and underscores our commitment to excellence and to our customers,” said Dave Excell, founder of Featurespace. 

The award follows Featurespace’s launch of Automated Deep Behavioural Networks for the card and payments industry, which provides a deeper layer of defence to protect consumers from scams, account takeover, card and payments fraud, which cost the financial services industry an estimated $42 billion in 2020. 

Featurespace was recognised in The Sunday Times’  Sage Tech Track 100, which celebrates Britain’s private technology companies with the fastest-growing sales. The company also recently received a Business Culture Award for “Culture in a Crisis” by demonstrating strength in its strong culture before and during the pandemic.

Acronis, the global leader in cyber protection, is pleased to announce that it has received more than $250 million funding round from CVC Capital Partners VII and other investors. Acronis will use the funds to further accelerate growth by expanding its unique portfolio of natively integrated cyber protection products. A significant portion of the investment will also be used to further enhance Acronis’ go-to-market initiatives by expanding its broad partner network – most notably managed service providers (MSPs) – to help them better serve the cyber protection needs of their clients. The investment values the company at more than $2.5 billion.

“Acronis’ talented management and R&D teams have invested significant resources developing an innovative cloud-native ‘MSP in a box’ solution, with integrated backup, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, remote management, and workflow tools,” said Leif Lindbäck, Senior Managing Director of CVC Capital Partners. “Acronis provides mission-critical solutions to more than 10,000 MSPs and half a million small and medium businesses. CVC has a strong track record in cybersecurity and partnering up with successful entrepreneurs, and we are looking forward to teaming up with Serguei Beloussov and the Acronis team to accelerate the company’s growth.”

Acronis Cyber Protect is the first unified cybersecurity and data protection solution that is natively integrated, so service providers can operate these critical functions through a single pane of glass, delivering comprehensive cyber protection at a lower cost.

“With this additional funding, we will accelerate the development of our product portfolio and invest more in our partners’ success,” said Serguei “SB” Beloussov, founder and CEO of Acronis. “Our goal is to develop market-leading technology and help our partners grow their profits, while providing the best protection for their clients.”

Acronis will continue to invest in staff resources, expanding its global sales, partner account management and partner success teams, and hiring new technical talent for its research and development centres in Bulgaria, Israel, and Singapore, as well as Switzerland and the United States.

Focus on partners
Focusing on its growing partner network is critical to the company’s strategy for rapid growth. In February, the company launched the #CyberFit Partner Program to support the development of cloud-focused resellers and service providers. In March, Acronis made available a new version of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud – enabling partners to deliver comprehensive cyber protection for all workloads for little to no upfront cost. In April, Acronis introduced a new partner portal, providing easy access to content, tools, and training for partners.

With the new funding, Acronis will expand the support for cloud partners – providing them with additional sales and marketing resources, faster and localised technical support, dedicated partner success managers, and local data centres in 111 locations worldwide.

Phil Goodwin, Research Director, Cloud Data Management for Protection for IDC, notes that the investment from CVC will add to the momentum behind cyber protection. “Acronis has been at the forefront of the cyber protection movement, establishing itself as a pioneer in solutions that unify advanced cybersecurity with innovative data protection. By continuing to expand their technical capabilities and partner network, the value they bring to the market will only increase.”

Service providers who are interested in learning more about how they can benefit from Acronis’ partner-focused approach are encouraged to visit https://www.acronis.com/en-us/partners/.

About Acronis
Acronis unifies data protection and cybersecurity to deliver integrated, automated cyber protection that solves the safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security (SAPAS) challenges of the modern digital world. With flexible deployment models that fit the demands of service providers and IT professionals, Acronis provides superior cyber protection for data, applications, and systems with innovative next-generation antivirus, backup, disaster recovery, and endpoint protection management solutions. With award-winning AI-based antimalware and blockchain-based data authentication technologies, Acronis protects any environment – from cloud to hybrid to on-premises – at a low and predictable cost.

Founded in Singapore in 2003 and incorporated in Switzerland in 2008, Acronis now has more than 1,600 employees in 33 locations in 18 countries. Its solutions are trusted by more than 5.5 million home users and 500,000 companies, including 100% of the Fortune 1000, and top-tier professional sports teams. Acronis products are available through 50,000 partners and service providers in over 150 countries in more than 40 languages.

About CVC Capital Partners
CVC is a leading private equity and investment advisory firm with a network of 23 offices throughout Europe, Asia and the US, with approximately US$118 billion of assets under management. Since its founding in 1981, CVC has secured commitments in excess of US$160 billion from some of the world's leading institutional investors across its private equity and credit strategies. Funds managed or advised by CVC are invested in over 90 companies worldwide, which have combined annual sales of approximately US$100 billion and employ more than 450,000 people. For further information about CVC please visit: www.cvc.com.

Mphasis, an Information Technology (IT) solutions provider specializing in cloud and cognitive services, is expanding its footprint in the UK with a special focus on Customer led Digital Transformation initiatives in banking & insurance, by establishing a nearshore center, outside of London. Mphasis expects to:

1. Create close to 1000 UK jobs to begin with; capability to scale and cater to customers even beyond the UK, thus potentially creating a much larger opportunity in the job market

2. Invest over GBP 25 million upfront towards establishing a UK center  

3. Provide best in class upskill and training in both digital transformation as well as domain expertise in the UK banking & insurance segments.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “Trade and investment between the UK and India is creating good jobs and sustaining livelihoods in both of our countries. I’m very pleased that Mphasis has decided to join the legions of Indian companies investing in the UK, boosting our tech sector, and driving economic growth.”

“Having successfully executed at least half a dozen similar transformational partnerships in the banking & insurance industry, we are confident of building for the future and ensuring a client-first approach. I am excited to elevate our presence in the UK to support future growth, improve operating agility, flexibility and harness local capabilities towards bolstering our offerings over the long term,” said Nitin Rakesh, CEO and Executive Director, Mphasis. 

Focused on the insurance market, this centre aims to deliver the best technology and insurance operations services to clients through innovation in operational, technological, and service excellence. Mphasis brings its existing digital & domain expertise, as well as global capabilities to constitute a proposition and capability that can be harnessed and tailored to meet individual UK client needs.  

Clearwater Analytics, an industry-leading SaaS solution for automated investment data aggregation, reconciliation, accounting, and reporting, announced today that it has appointed Colin Clunie to Head of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Operations. 

Based in Edinburgh, Colin previously held a number of senior leadership roles across financial services. Most recently he was the Head of Investment Operations at Athora, a European insurance company, and responsible for leading the development of the investment operations platform.  Prior to this he was the COO, Investment Operations at BlackRock, Inc responsible for leading global operational teams delivering investment services and solutions to the firm’s global clients. Colin also held senior leadership positions in BlackRock’s Risk and Internal Audit functions. Prior to joining BlackRock, Colin was the Head of Operational Risk at Standard Life and also held senior roles in the Internal Audit function.   

Colin qualified as a Chartered Accountant with EY and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. He is also a member of the University of Dundee Audit & Risk Committee and a Board Trustee with Rowan Alba, a Scottish based charity supporting homeless people. Colin holds a Master’s degree in Financial Economics from the University of Dundee. 

“Colin brings tremendous leadership experience in financial services, operations, and technology to Clearwater,” said Subi Sethi, Chief Client Officer, Clearwater Analytics. “His experience will be extremely valuable as we continue to expand and service more clients across Europe.”  

“I’ve been impressed by Clearwater’s compelling product and delivery capability in the market for a long time, and equally impressed by the organisation’s culture of innovation and focus on client service to provide solutions and business insights not just for today, but also well into the future,” said Colin Clunie.  "I’m excited to be joining the company as we grow the EMEA and international business, as well as attract the highest calibre of diverse talent to support the company’s expanding client base.” 

Bitcoin.com Exchange, the trading platform of the Bitcoin.com Brand, announces its partnership with Sumsub, an identity verification platform that provides an all-in-one technical and legal toolkit for KYC/KYB/AML needs. Through this partnership, Bitcoin.com Exchange has found a way to convert more clients quickly while ensuring compliance with international regulations.

Bitcoin.com Exchange is a service for fast and efficient trading with a powerful, built-in matching engine and high liquidity. The exchange currently has over 500K active traders and offers over 200 popular trading pairs, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, and Litecoin. To keep its platform secure, Bitcoin.com Exchange uses cold storage, institutional-grade encryption, and IP whitelisting. 

To sign up new traders quickly and reduce manual workflow, Bitcoin.com Exchange has partnered with Sumsub. The exchange has since managed to cut verification time down to around 5 minutes, while making the flow more intuitive for thousands of newcoming users. What’s more, partnering with Sumsub has automated compliance for Bitcoin.com Exchange by making all verification and document checks easily adjustable through a single dashboard. This has significantly reduced the burden on compliance officers, speeding up their workflows by over 90%.

‘The changing nature of regulatory demands, combined with increased demands for transparency, call for more sophisticated compliance automation. To maintain these increasing standards and support our reputation on the global market, we needed a KYC solution that is able to live up to hundreds of regulatory requirements efficiently. With Sumsub’s world-class technology, our verification flow got much easier for people to use and for us to adjust to the appropriate jurisdiction. We are happy to be working together,  knowing that when it comes to compliance and verification, Sumsub has our back.’— Danish Chaudhry, CEO at Bitcoin.com Exchange.

‘For most payment companies, compliance has become a top priority. This is especially true for crypto companies, as they need to ensure compliance of their technology as well as the onboarding process itself. With our help, all of Bitcoin.com Exchange’s user verification processes will be more simple, fast, and in sync with regulatory requirements.’— Jacob Sever, Co-founder of Sumsub.

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit will launch in May Bybit Cloud Mining, a mining-as-a-service (MaaS) product that gives users instant access to ether (ETH) mining from as little as $100.

Democratizing and de-risking crypto mining

The relentless growth of cryptocurrencies in recent months has caught mainstream attention and fueled a surge in interest in crypto mining — or receiving crypto tokens for verifying blocks of transactions.

The profitability of this endeavor, however, is hampered by a number of factors: the supply and price of the computer system, operation and maintenance cost, and electricity fees that render crypto mining costly and painstaking.

As the first entry to Bybit's ByFi product suite, Bybit Cloud Mining aims to help users navigate the booming yet ever-changing industry by lowering the barrier to entry and ensuring a hassle-free approach to mining, thus opening the door to greater profitability and fewer risks. Bybit Cloud Mining offers hashing power, or hash rate, to a remote data center with shared computing power to mine ether. Users can start from as low as $100 and without ever having to run their own hardware.  

Hop on, hop off: high visibility and profitability

Bybit Cloud Mining offers flexible 7-, 21-, and 42-day plans. Users can customize a short-term investment plan for greater profitability, while minimizing the risks of price fluctuations and unforeseeable market activities in the long term. The service will be instantly available upon purchase, come with 100% usability, and have any downtime covered by Bybit, allowing users to mine with greater confidence.

"We are really excited to introduce Bybit Cloud Mining, and think it is an ideal solution for users who are interested in crypto mining, but don't want to be bogged down by the hassle of operations and hardware maintenance, " said Bill Xing, head of financial products at Bybit. "With Bybit Cloud Mining, all that users have to do is to purchase the amount of hashrate they want and sit back to see ETH harvested directly 'from the cloud'."

Over the years, QR code payments have witnessed impressive but fragmented global growth, with significant transaction value differences between the regions. Their ability to combine payments and loyalty makes them ideal for retailers seeking to leverage valuable transactional data, while their low-cost nature is expected to drive growth in the years to come.

According to data presented by AksjeBloggen.com, global QR code payments are expected to reach $2.21trn value this year and then continue rising to $2.71trn by 2025. As the world's largest QR code payments market, China is forecast to generate 85% of that value.

QR Code Transactions in Latin America to Soar by 3,500% by 2025

Compared to contactless payments, QR code transactions have a low acceptance cost, making them appealing to retailers in emerging markets, with the lack of card infrastructure.

In 2020, the entire market hit $2.11trn transaction value, revealed the Statista and Juniper Research data. After rising to $2.21trn this year, the combined value of all QR code payments worldwide is expected to jump by another $495bn by 2025.

As the world's largest QR code payments market, China is set to reach $2.37trn transaction value by 2025, or 46 times more than all other regions combined. Although there are a number of QR code schemes around the world, none of them is more successful than the two primary Chinese players, Alipay and WeChat Pay. In February 2021, Alibaba Group`s Alipay was the leading payment app in China, with over 658 million monthly active users.

However, other markets, especially the emerging ones, are set to witness a staggering growth of QR code payments.

Although the smallest of all regions by total transaction value, Latin America is expected to see its QR code payments explode by 3,500% and hit $21.2bn value by 2025, compared to $582 million in 2021.

North America is set to witness a 205% growth in this period, with the transaction value of QR code payments rising from $8.9bn in 2021 to $27.2bn in 2025.

The statistics show that national QR code payment standards, like SGQR in Singapore, will be powerful accelerators to the global growth of QR code payments. In the next four years, national QR code payment schemes will account for 22% of all QR code payments, up from 8% in 2020.

European QR Code Transactions Lag Behind

Although Europe also witnessed an increase in QR code payments in recent years, its growth rate is considerably lower than other regions.

The providers of six mobile e-wallets in Europe, including Austria’s Bluecode, Finland’s ePassi and Pivo, Oslo-based Vipps, Spain’s Momo and Portugal’s Pagaqui, are collaborating with China’s Alipay in a QR code mobile payment network that allows users of each wallet to pay for their purchases across ten countries in Europe.

Statistics show the combined transaction value of all QR code payments in European countries is expected to grow by 37% to $2.2bn in 2025, which is twelve times less than North America and nine times less than Latin American countries.

The full story can be read here: https://aksjebloggen.com/qr-code-payments-to-hit-2-7t-value-by-2025-china-to-generate-85-of-all-transactions/